Bruce
had a long history of mental illness, including attempted suicide and attacks
on both his mother and his father. In the year before the murder, he was
hospitalized at the Riverview Psychiatric Center in Augusta, Maine, where his
doctors noted that he was hostile, paranoid and “dangerous if released to the
community without pharmacological treatment.” Yet, Bruce refused medication,
saying he didn’t need treatment, the hospital released him when his involuntary
commitment term expired, and two months later he killed his mother.

Not well: “when his involuntary commitment term expired….”

You can only hold an individual for a limited period of time
in America.

In France, as noted yesterday, you can hold a dangerous
person indefinitely.

Note well: he “refused medication.”

The law grants schizophrenics a moral agency that they lack.
Suffering from a brain disease, they do not even know that they are ill.

Bernstein explains:

People
who are mentally ill often suffer from agnosia, or a lack of insight into the
illness; they don’t believe they are sick. Family members or parents may not
comprehend the extent of the illness or may not be able to control their loved
one and get him help.

Some schizophrenics hear voices. They believe that the
voices are real. There is no way you are going to convince them that the voices
are not real.

The law that limits the time you can commit them also grants
them the right to refuse medication.

We cringe at the idea of depriving an individual of his free
will, but paranoid schizophrenics do not seem to possess the mental competence
required to make a judgment.

Since their illness affects their brain, they lack certain
basic mental capacity.

Of course, once Bruce murdered his mother, he was confined
to a psychiatric facility indefinitely. Since that time, Bruce has been forced to take his
medication and has made great progress.

Four years later Bernstein spoke to him on the telephone.

In her words:

When
Bruce came to the phone on Tuesday, he was lucid and articulate. “I have never
been this good since before I became ill, in my late teens or early 20s,” he
says. He credits Abilify and his daily therapeutic treatments with helping to
put his mind back together and says he plans never to stop taking the drug. “My
mom would be here today if I’d taken the medication and had accepted that I had
a mental illness instead of denying it,” he says.

Psychopharmacology has made extraordinary progress in the
treatment of psychosis. The legal system has set up roadblocks that make it very difficult for those who need treatment to receive it.

2 comments:

One problem I see with revamping the mental health laws, is the question of who gets to define 'mentally ill.'

There are quite a few people in this country--many in positions of power and influence--who would categorize gun owners, those who reject feminist orthodoxy, those who deny the near-divinity of Barack Obama and those who recognize that socialism doesn't work...as 'mentally ill.' In fact, Communist Russia did just that. Those who weren't down with the People's Revolution were adjudicated in need of 'reeducation,' and we all know what that meant.